- Coming up, we take a look at our teamwork experience
to get even more powerful by combining Office 365
and the new cross device whiteboard capabilities
as part of Windows 10, all within Microsoft 365.
I'm joined today by Nydia Cavazos from the Surface team.
Welcome.
- Hey Jeremy, it's great to be here.
- So, when people think about devices,
they really think about individual productivity
and maybe creativity that they're doing on that device,
but it's really broader than that, right?
- Right, where Surface really comes into play
is in creating new product categories and experiences.
Across the portfolio, we're focused on making sure that
a device gets out of the way of you expressing yourself
so you can interact in the way that's most natural to you.
Part of how we achieved this is by incorporated ink
and touch support across all our Surface devices.
Of course, this also extends to how
we free you up to collaborate.
Right now, I'm here next to Surface Hub, which is our large
screen communal device built for collaboration.
- Right, and one of the advantages here is that even if
I'm miles apart from the person I'm collaborating with,
as we've shown before, when you address somebody
who's remote, it's like they're in the room
and you're looking right at them.
- Yes, even if you are participating remotely,
we want you to feel like you are in the room.
We've incorporated many principles around interactivity
in our Surface portfolio.
For example, in how we've engineered our microphone
and camera in your Surface devices to allow
video and point interactions with others.
- [Jeremy] Right, and of course, beyond the device itself,
matching the power of Surface devices along with
Office 365 and Windows 10 is really where
the collaboration experiences come together.
- Exactly.
Let's go through a scenario here in the Surface Hub,
and you can join me from your Surface Book 2.
I'm already signed in to Office 365,
and the power here is that single sign-on
allows you to sign in to all your Microsoft apps
like PowerPoint, Excel, and Word,
but also into any app that leverages Azure Active Directory.
We have some examples here such as Sprinklr, UserVoice,
and many others within the Edge browser.
- It's really easy to get all your app experiences
and really share and collaborate them, as you can see here,
across almost any cloud service.
- Exactly, so I'm gonna launch Teams
right from the Edge browser.
Of course, I could've done that from the Office 365 Portal,
but since I was already on Edge,
I launched it right through there.
- [Jeremy] One of the great things here
is that Teams is actually saving you
from launching multiple apps discretely.
As you're inside of Teams, you can get to all
of your different Office 365 experiences.
- Mmhmm, absolutely.
We're in fact seeing more and more people
using Microsoft Teams with Surface devices
for the rich integrated experience.
Also, because Surface Hub uses the WebRTC,
or Real Time Communication protocol,
even websites running WebRTC can leverage
cameras and speakers in the Surface Hub.
If you haven't tried Teams yet, you should.
Teams is a persistent chat-based environment
for collaboration but incorporates online meetings,
calls, and also, all your files and content.
If I click on Teams, I can see all the different workstreams
that I have or I'm working on.
I can also see all the people that I'm working with
for each one of them, and I can see the whole history
of the conversation including all the files we've shared.
- An important part of the call out here is that
all the files and content within Teams
are really stored in SharePoint in the backend,
and that means that they benefit from all the security
and compliance controls that we have,
like co-authoring support, for example.
For example, here I've got a PowerPoint file that
I've recently uploaded into Teams in the conversation view.
When I do that, it actually loads into the Teams files
so you can easily get to it right here
from the Files directory.
Right now, what I can do within Teams is I can go ahead
and start editing against this PowerPoint directly.
- Mmhmm, and the cool thing is that
we can view it directly within Teams.
We can also edit and co-author in real time.
In fact, I can see that you're in the document right now.
And, your changes seem to be coming through.
- [Jeremy] There we go,
I just made a quick change to the title.
- Now, I'm going to bring in a few team members
by joining a meeting in Teams
using the integrated online meeting capabilities.
I'm gonna go into my meetings and check out
the Teams calendar and now join with one click.
Hey Frank, hi Strider.
Welcome to the team.
- And I'm joined here from my Surface Book 2 as well.
- From directly within Teams, I can easily access one of our
most powerful collaboration experiences, the whiteboard.
In here, we have several new features you guys can leverage.
For example, I can add a post-it or a note
from our brainstorming session.
In here, I'm gonna add a Surface Studio,
and we can also stack images from our brainstorming session
to create an album that we can access later.
We can open those images,
and then start working on them afterwards.
Also, we have diversity view, which allows us to see
the whole whiteboard so that we can define
which element we wanna keep collaborating on.
And if you're wondering how to access
the whiteboards in Teams as a website,
please check out the link shown below.
- Now that we're in the whiteboard,
it's also worth pointing out, with the new Whiteboard app,
any Windows 10 device can join and collaborate.
If you go back to our project on team workspace design,
I can see that you have some images of rooms here
with Surface Hubs in them.
- Yes, I do.
In fact, Surface Hub really opened our eyes
to the importance of organized meeting rooms
for teamwork and collaboration.
Everyone knows their favorite conference room
or the ones that they want to avoid,
but there are common design pitfalls that we can prevent.
In fact, I can see that Strider and Frank
have already started making some comments in here.
For example, Frank is saying that there's no easy access
from the table to the Surface Hub,
and Strider is commenting that the room is too crowded,
hence not allowing for collaboration.
So Jeremy, I can also see that you're recommending to move
this table and you're sharing from your Surface Book 2.
- Right, and none of us are really designers here,
but Microsoft has partnered with Steelcase
to establish design principles for teamwork spaces.
Back on my Surface Book 2, I'm actually running
one of the room designers here in AutoCAD,
and the great thing with this device,
because of the built-in Nvidia GPU,
it can handle really GPU and graphics intensive processes
right from within this laptop.
Here I've connected to the Surface Hub.
In this case, we've got the ideation hub design open
and you can see here that I can actually interact
directly with what's running on my computer
and rotate that device.
In this room's design, we can see the chairs are bar stools,
so I can easily move between my chair and my Surface Hub.
And the table in this case,
unlike your picture, isn't dominating the room.
- What this also shows is that Win32 apps
that wouldn't install on the Surface Hub can be projected
and controlled via touchback on the Surface Hub.
Using the top view to look at this design,
you can see that the Surface Hub is easily accessible
from everywhere in the room.
Now, I'm going to take a snapshot of this design
to bring it to my whiteboard and start inking on it.
I can just click on this snipping tool,
select the part that I wanna work on, and now,
you can see what I was explaining earlier.
Every participant from this meeting can easily come
to the Surface Hub and collaborate side by side.
Now, also look at the technology in the room,
because Surface Hub is an all in one conferencing device.
The only piece of technology that we need in the room
is a Surface Hub.
- Can we see then how the design principles actually
translate into the redesign of our room?
- Of course.
When we started the remodel of the room it looked like this.
It was absolutely empty.
Then, we have brought our design principles
and the room looked like this.
As you can see, people can move freely and openly
from their seating to the Surface Hub.
There's also different levels of seating for people
to be in a larger meeting,
and there's also two different Surface Hubs in the room
depending on how many people are attending.
You can also see that we have added a Surface Studio
to increase the collaboration.
In fact, Frank is joining us from this very room.
- You've shown then how the software of Office 365
and Windows 10 and the new Whiteboard app plus devices
plus even the workspace design really contribute
to make a better creativity and collaboration environment.
Where can people go to learn more
to learn about Surface devices and creative spaces?
- If you want to learn about how to design your space
for teamwork and collaboration, you can contact
a Steelcase partner at the link shown below.
This information already includes
five creative spaces for inspiration.
Also, we have a growing number of devices
in our Surface portfolio,
and you can check all about them in the link shown.
I hope we've inspired you to check our Surface
devices portfolio and the integrated app
and collaboration experiences in Office 365 and Windows 10.
Thanks Nydia, and also thank you to Frank and Strider
for joining us remotely, and thank you all
for joining us online today for Microsoft Mechanics.
That's about all the time we have for this show.
We'll see you next time.